In last week’s devotional we saw that if you want to understand Leviticus, you have to understand holiness, as seen in the theme, “Be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy” (19:2), which you find again and again throughout the book. But now we should ask what holiness is, since many of us have a mistaken idea of it. Somehow we think of holiness in exclusively ethical terms. Because we think of ethics as a scale from 0 (if you’re very bad) to 100 (if you’re very good), we think of holiness as kind of moving up the scale.

The first section is that of clean and unclean foods (Lev. 11). This distinction between clean and unclean animals goes all the way back to the flood, because the animals that came on board were identified as either clean or unclean. However, we weren’t told back then how they were distinguished. Now we are told. In addition to making this distinction between animals for health reasons, we can also see how this first section demonstrated the second explanation above, namely, as a way to separate God’s people from the world.

Of the sacrifices, the burnt offering is mentioned first because it was the most important. Leviticus doesn’t tell us what it was for because the answer is obvious. All the sacrifices on the altar are for sin. The text focuses on how the animals are to be handled. Notice two matters about this. First, the worshiper was to lay his hand upon the head of the burnt offering that was going to be accepted on his behalf (see Lev. 4:1). That’s a very critical idea and it pertains to all of the sacrifices. When the worshiper put his hand upon the sacrifice, this was a way in which he symbolically transferred his sin or guilt to the sacrifice. It was a kind of confession of sin, such that in a symbolic way his sin was passed to the animal. And then when the animal was taken and killed, it was killed in the place of the worshiper.

The Holy Spirit is given to us to enable us to follow as God leads and as we follow, to know that we are protected from all enemies. Nothing will ever happen to us that does not first pass through the will of God, and that whatever happens according to the will of God is ultimately for our good. “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him” (Rom. 8:28). To follow the Lord in obedience to His commands, knowing that He always watches over and protects us, is our opportunity and our joy. 

God’s revealing Himself in the cloud culminates in the coming of Jesus Christ. You may recall that at the very beginning of John’s Gospel, John uses this very language, harkening back to Exodus, to talk about the incarnation. Speaking of Jesus, John writes, “The Word became flesh and lived for a while among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (1:14). Revelation 21 gives us the fulfillment of this idea of God’s dwelling among us. In verse 3 the apostle John wrote, “And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and will be their God.’” Through the appearing of the cloud in Exodus, God was teaching them about His presence in a preliminary, rudimentary, visible, and dramatic way for the people of Israel.